Adele Mara was a Hollywood star in the 1940s shared the big screen with Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Fred Astaire and John Wayne. She was the leading lady in the war film Sands of Iwo Jima (1949).
A classic Hollywood bathing beauty, she probably appeared as often in swimming costumes in movie magazines as she did in acting roles in movies, particularly in her early days during the Second World War.
She was born Adelaide Delgado in Highland Park, Michigan, in 1923, and began her showbusiness career as a dancer after being spotted by bandleader Xavier Cugat. She signed with Columbia Pictures in the early 1940s and was one of Rita Hayworth’s sisters in You Were Never Lovelier (1942), in which Cugat and his orchestra played themselves.
After leaving Columbia she made several films with John Wayne at Republic Pictures. She taught Wayne how to jitterbug for The Fighting Seabees (1944) and played a wife and expectant mother left at home when the men go off to fight in Sands of Iwo Jima.
In the early 1950s she married Roy Huggins, the writer and creator of the Maverick (1957-62) and the Fugitive (1963-67) hit TV series’. Latterly she too worked mainly in television, often on her husband’s programmes. Huggins died in 2002. She is survived by three sons.
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Adele Mara, actress, was born on April 28, 1923. She died on May 7, 2010, aged 87